Saturday, July 23, 2011

Juliana Leslie, More Radiant Signal

Green's Function

Read the pictorial sunset moving backwards. Place the subject in her boat. Address the hand as it leaves the body. Consider the necessary element of surprise in the painting, the lack of similitude before you temper the definition. Say goodbye carnelian. Swallow the whole country if you can, the whole egg about to unfold. Consider salt as currency and meanwhile or further intuit the sun one letter at a time. Consider the falling viceroy, his plum shirt, the quiet signature you make in the sand, the glass, the inkwell, the mind alike in one mouth, the humble boy, his leafcutters, the bottom falls out.

Juliana Leslie's first trade poetry collection, More Radiant Signal (Chicago IL: Letter Machine Editions, 2010), is an impressive debut collection of taut lyric and prose poems. Her pieces are like small moments, stretched to slow conclusion, exploring the tangible essences of abstract things. Moving effortlessly from line to line, Leslie's poems end up in odd, considered places. A radiant signal indeed, furthering all else it brings.

Unknown Quantity

How many ways to exist?

I don't have a pencil

as if I could write this

I can't even think

You are the textual orange

between presence and absence

Wind in the subtext is my wind

Mom is in the alphabet

Simultaneously all of the gesture

you ever want:

mittens, war and calico

Throughout the collection, Leslie seems to have a fascination with colour, making her More Radiant Signal nearly an entire book on colour, radiant on all sides, such as in the poem “Paul Klee,” “Unknown Quality,” or “Softer More Radiant Signal,” that begins:

Tell me more about

crayons, contingency

and winter fruit

polyamorous structural

locations we know aren't always the best

for human hands anyway

Tell me she is all worn out

from work

and thinking

Unlike her shorter lyric pieces, which make up the bulk of the collection, Leslie's slightly longer poems appear more disjointed and fragmented, suggesting space, writing a series of similar moments to her shorter pieces, further stretched. With so much everything and almost nothing happening, her poems slowly work up to the point, which is not the point. Hers are poems, to tweak Auden's infamous quote, that make nothing happen. How is that even possible?